Philips Launches Rugged ESee Pocket Camcorder

Philips has announced its entry into the pocket camcorder
market with the Philips ESee camcorder, a waterproof, shockproof and dustproof
device with an 8 megapixel sensor.

The Philips ESee camcorder will come in various “vibrant
colours” including tangerine orange, aqua blue and cherry red and measures
109 x 55 x 20mm which should make it nice and pocket-friendly.

Waterproof to 3m and shockproof to 1.5m, the Philips ESee
camcorder is certainly designed for the outdoors, just like its main competitor,
the Kodak Zx5 PlaySport – which is among the runners for this year’s
TrustedReviews Awards.

The Philips ESee camcorders will feature an 8 megapixel
sensor and 0ffers full HD 1080p video capture at 30fps or 720p video at 60
fps. It will aslo capturee videos in "email friendly
file formats" so users can share videos online.

It has very little internal memory, just 128MB, most of which
will be taken up with the bundled software which aims to make it easier to
share your videos on the net. It will only take microSD cards, limiting your
recording capacity to 32GB. However, thanks to an advanced compression
technique letting you save HD videos as smaller files, this should still give
you 8 hours of Full HD video.

On the rear is a 2in LCD display with a 480 x 234 pixel
resolution and the Philips ESee also includes an HDMI-out port to let you watch
your recordings on a TV or laptop. Charging is via mini-USB and a three hour
charge will give you two hours shooting time.

The camcorder features 5x digital zoom, and has a bright
f2.8 aperture lens with a 3x LED flash and auto-focus. It also features
face-tracking and smile detection.

The Philips ESee is on sale now for around £149.99 which
also gets you a wrist strap and soft protective case.